Paul Skenes Responds to Report of Teammate Saying He Wants to Play for Yankees

Pirates general manager Ben Cherington stated this week that the team is not trading ace Paul Skenes this offseason, but a report emerged Wednesday with a teammate claiming Skenes has said he wants to play for the Yankees.

According to a report from NJ Advance Media, the teammate stated that Skenes said he has “no confidence the Pirates ever are going to win” while he’s in Pittsburgh. “Trust me, he wants to play for the Yankees,” the Skenes teammate said. “I’ve heard him say it multiple times.”

The report also came hours before Skenes won the Cy Young award for the first time—doing so unanimously. Skenes ended up addressing the claims after winning the prestigious pitching award.

“I got shown the Tweet and really didn’t think anything of it,” Skenes said Wednesday on a Zoom, via 93.7 The Fan. “I got some texts about it. I’m on the Pirates, my goal is to win with the Pirates. I love the city of Pittsburgh.”

Skenes also said of the report, “I don’t know where that came from, the goal is to win. I don’t know the reporter that reported it. I don’t know the player who supposedly said that, but the goal is to win and the goal is to win in Pittsburgh.”

Skenes is not just focused on the Pirates, but leading the team to winning. While Skenes got to celebrate his Cy Young win, he remained focused on his goal to help the Pirates win going forward as he spoke to the media.

“Pittsburgh, the way that fans see us outside of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh is not supposed to win,” Skenes said. “There are 29 fan bases that expect us to lose. I want to be a part of the group, a part of the 26 guys that change that.”

“The fans are hungry to have a winner in Pittsburgh and I want to be a part of the group that did that. I think about it the same way as when I was at the Air Force Academy,” he said. “We had never been to a conference championship and my sophomore year we ended up winning the conference. We had never finished in the top four in the conference before that.”

The Pirates have not made the playoffs in a decade and have gone just 147-177 over Skenes' two seasons in Pittsburgh. Overall, they’ve advanced to the postseason just three times in the last 33 years and have not made or won the World Series since 1979, well before Skenes was even born. He's determined to change that.

"Forty-six years since we won a World Series championship,” Skenes said. “This is why I’m going to show up to the ballpark and I’m going to work to get everybody pushing in the same direction and I know there are other guys that are going to do the same. That’s all the truth.”